She
leads up to the climax of her story, the deadly revenge of the
dark twin's poisoned pie, with admirable art. The nurse's name
was Mercy, but, as Dickens remarks, she showed none to him.
Though Dickens shrank timorously in childhood from her frightful
stories, he himself, like the fat boy in _Pickwick_, sometimes
"wants to make our flesh creep." It seems, indeed, an odd trait
of the humorist that he can at will wholly discard his gaiety,
and, like the Pied Piper, pipe to another measure. W.W. Jacobs,
besides his humorous sailor yarns, has given us _The Monkey's
Paw_; and Barry Pain's gruesome stories, _Told in the Dark_, are
as forcible as any of his humours to be read in the daylight.
Dickens, in his excursions into the supernatural, does not,
however, always cast off his mood of jocularity. His treatment of
Marley's ghost lacks dignity and decorum. Clanking its chains in
a remote cellar of the silent, empty house, it has the power to
disturb us, but we lose our respect for the shade when we gaze
upon it eye to eye. Applied to the spirit world, there is much
truth in the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. The
account of the thirteenth juryman, in _Dr. Marigold's
Prescriptions_, is much more alarming. The story of the
signalman, No. 1 Branch line, in _Mugby Junction_, is indefinably
horrible.
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